Memes to Mayhem is a documentary about 4Chan, the popular imageboard site that became the petri dish for the birth of QAnon, the mother of all crazy conspiracy theories. The story of 4Chan is a fascinating chapter in the evolution of internet culture. But if the 4Chan saga hadn’t culminated in the arrival of QAnon, we probably wouldn’t have seen a documentary about it airing on Netflix today. Considering the importance of QAnon (i.e., half of the population now believes that bad psychotic fantasy scenarios are the essence of reality), you’d think that by the time the movie finished its creation, you’d feel like you were entering the final circle of Heart of Darkness.
but not. Ironically, the origins of QAnon are the lighthearted and funniest part of “The Anti-Social Network.” It’s not that QAnon itself wasn’t catastrophic in its devastation to the country. Among all the factors that contribute to Donald Trump’s stubborn popularity is the fact that many of his supporters are QAnon leaders and believe they are working with a pedophile Satanic cult that is backed and protected by the Democratic Party Fight. , not a secondary factor. There are some good documentaries that track the QAnon phenomenon (such as After the Truth: The Costs of Disinformation and Fake News, in which we see dashcam footage of Edgar Madison Welch wielding an assault rifle of Pizzagate “Avenger,” on his way to his mission), and the baroque paranoid beliefs of QAnon followers have been well documented.
But The Antisocial Network takes us back to before all of this, to what QAnon really is: a fool. no more, no less. Pizzagate is the origin story of the QAnon pedophile cabal concept, spread with chuckles by 4Chan users, and based on interpretations of bizarre code (like the idea of a cheese pizza, with the initials CP, standing for “child porn”). Once the mysterious entity known as Q emerged and began spreading incisive breadcrumbs about nefarious government behavior, 4Chan’s programmers piqued their interest in it because that’s always been their raison d’être: fanning the flames of government deviance. The weirder and wilder the Mishgas, the better, and making it all go viral. That’s what makes them excited.
One of the things that makes Q credible is that he will post a message on Twitter and 10 minutes later it will be echoed by a tweet from Trump. How could this happen?Documentary reveals: How Q tweets are actually done back Trump’s tweet, just parodied it – but the time code on the tweet was changed to make it look like Trump took his cue from Q. This is what is known as a basic deepfake internet lie. But it worked. It fools people. 4Chan programmers achieved viral sensation and joy.
No one in their right mind could have predicted that large swaths of the country would start taking these things more seriously than a New York Times report. In a way, all they did was make a bad joke, even though now that joke could destroy America. QAnon is a cult, but part of its weird nature is that it was an accidental cult. There’s no mastermind at its center; Q speaks his declarations out loud, but they’re no more true than the Wizard of Oz. This is what makes QAnon a conspiracy theory pyramid scheme: a sinister “conspiracy” in which each of its followers holds up a small part of their own belief system. QAnon’s virality lies in its only Reality.
So how did we get here? The Antisocial Network traces how 4Chan over the past 20 years has created an online universe in which outrageous satire, “goofball” stunts, and free-flowing impotent political rage threaten to coalesce into perpetual rebellion. “illegal” position. The website is modeled after 2Chan, a Japanese website from the early 2000s that most Japanese citizens accessed via mobile phones but didn’t have much bandwidth. This is part of the reason why the idea of emojis and anonymous bulletin boards came about.
A user named “moot” downloaded a copy of the 2Chan software, and in October 2003 an English version called 4Chan was launched. It was filled with cartoons, videos, and what came to be known as memes. I’m surprised the documentary didn’t mention that it was essentially an early version of TikTok. The content is engaging, extreme, profane, and sometimes reactionary, driven by a Darwinian spirit: the weirdest posts get the most clicks. The first official 4Chan panel was held in 2005 at Otakon, a comics convention in Baltimore, where moot made its public debut. He turned out to be a smiling kid named Christopher Poole who looked like a 15-year-old Matt Damon. From the beginning, he had a Zuckerberg-like aura. He wants 4Chan to become the Facebook of bro-anarchy.
That was probably the case until a handful of 4Chan voices coalesced into an insurgent group called Anonymous. Their goal is to “speak truth to power” by spreading a meme of the Guy Fawkes mask from V for Vendetta, encouraging 4Chan followers to wear the mask in public protests. Anonymous attacks Scientology and conducts “attacks,” such as spoofing neo-Nazi radio host Hal Turner. The pinnacle of 4Chan’s social activism was participation in the Occupy Wall Street movement. This is what 4Chan cares about.
The thing is, it’s tricky to be concerned about AIDS one day and make fun of it the next. Everything 4Chan does is ultimately for show, and its representatives in the film, like the calm hippie Fuxnet or the angry Kitaner, have some regrets but aren’t exactly sources of self-awareness. They don’t seem to know that one of the worst things they do is help turn “activism” into a form of virtue signaling.
I’m not entirely sure the documentary understands this either. Yet “The Antisocial Network,” directed by Giorgio Angelini and Arthur Jones and featuring a lightning montage of virtual imagery, is a vivid lesson in digital history that leaves you with an unsettling feeling that Some of the most influential products of internet culture are, like QAnon, essentially a fluke. On the other hand, maybe it has a perverse design. 4Chan’s hackers and programmers are all looking for fun. They want eyeballs and will do whatever it takes to get them. QAnon brainwashed an entire country, but in its own way, achieved that dream. It allows America to indulge in crazy conspiracy theories because crazy conspiracy theories are more interesting than reality.